This tutorial assumes a couple of things.
a.) You are not scared of the command line.
b.) You can deal with a Debian text- or GUI-based installer without needing a walk-through.
c.) You have a wired (ethernet) internet connection or a wireless connection without WPA encryption (the Debian installer can't do WPA for some reason, only unsecured or WEP encryption.)

4. fix sources.list (if necessary) and install xorg, gnome-core, and a browser:
(If you installed via a wired ethernet connection, this step won't be necessary, because the installer will have asked you which mirror to use and will have automatically disabled the CDROM from the sources.list file.)
from prompt:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
change the line that refers to the cdrom installer to:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free
(I’m in the US, so this is the closest Debian mirror to me. See: http://www.debian.org/mirror/list for a closer one.)
Note: if you want the distro to stay "rolling" once Squeeze goes "stable," substitute the word "squeeze" for "testing" above.

reboot into new kernel, either log out from Gnome, or type at the prompt:
sudo shutdown -r now

6. Make things Minty!
Log into Gnome.
Start Chromium and go to http://packages.linuxmint.com
Click on “Linux Mint Debian”
Click on “linuxmint-keyring” and save the file.
Next, go to http://www.debian-multimedia.org. Scroll down to where it says, ﻿The first package to install is debian-multimedia-keyring. Download the keyring package.

Now, open a terminal (alt+f2). Go to wherever the two *.deb files have been stored (probably ~/Downloads or perhaps just your home folder) and type:
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

The keyrings are now installed. Now you need to add the repositories for Mint and Debian-Multimedia.

sudo apt-get install mint-meta-debian notify-osd
(the “notify-osd” part is necessary if you want to have the ubuntu-style passive notifications, rather than the old-school Gnome notifications.)

Once the install is over, log out of Gnome and log back in.

7. Add Mint Menu

Right Click on the Gnome Menu Bar (where it says “Applications Places System”) and choose “Remove from Panel.”
Right Click on where the Menu Bar used to be and choose “Add to Panel.” Find the Mint Menu (“Advanced Gnome Menu”) and click on “add.” This will take a second to load and appear.

8. Fix Firefox’s locale.

Open a terminal and type
sudo aptitude search firefox-l10n

You’ll notice that firefox-l10n-af has an “i” by it, meaning "installed". That means that if you start Firefox, all of your menus and such will be in Afrikaans. Why? Presumably, since the LMDE installer asks for your language, it installs Firefox with the correct language. The Afrikaans package is the first one on the list, so I suppose that's why it gets installed by default. If you're a native speaker of Afrikaans, this might not matter to you Otherwise, you have to manually install the correct language package:

sudo apt-get install firefox-l10n-en-us (or whatever package matches your current locale -- I just happen to be in the US.)

apt-get will now install the American English package (or whichever package you’ve chosen) and automatically remove the Afrikaans package.

9. Have fun! Now you can do all kinds of things. Move the panel where you want it. Delete the bottom panel and add the “Show Desktop” and “Window List” applets to the remaining panel. Or don’t! It’s your choice.

Want compiz?
sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager
hit alt+f2 and type “ccsm”
Click on “Gnome Compatibility”, “Window Decoration”, and everything under “Window Management.” All other eye candy is optional.
Close ccsm and hit alt+f2 and type “compiz --replace”. If you want it to start automatically, add "compiz --replace" to the startup applications.

k3lt01 wrote:Excellent work, this is basically what I have done except I haven't really changed the basic Debian-Gnome base. I then installed the LMDE items using the MInt-Meta package.

Thanks, yeah, there's a number of ways one could do this -- you could use a standard Squeeze install CD or DVD or the Debian Live Gnome installer, then Mintify-it, only install a limited number of LMDE items, et cetera.

I discovered if I wanted to use the new mint-flashplugin package (that has the new Square plugin) that's in Romeo (it's the same version that's in Mint 10 RC), it conflicts with not only the flashplugin-nonfree package, but also the mint-meta-debian package (and everything installed by it!), so instead of just replacing the older flash plugin, it sets everything installed by Mint to autoremove.

What I did was to just do a "sudo apt-get autoremove" command, copy all of the names of packages to be removed into gedit, then let it autoremove them, then just do a mass "sudo apt-get install" of everything that had just been autoremoved. Took less than 5 minutes and nothing had to be downloaded, since it was still in the package cache directory.

Carl wrote:seemed to have solved my problem although I couldn't tell you how

Glad you solved it, regardless of how it happened!

That's a weird error, though. I used to get it if I installed gnome-core under Ubuntu from a minimal iso, but it would be for the fast-user-switch-applet, which isn't installable under Ubuntu, but is referred to by the gnome-core package.

Makes me wonder if something went wrong while you were installing packages (maybe something only partially configured) that got corrected when you installed something else subsequently.

knireis wrote:Next issue, the software manager does not start, it is in the menu but when i click it nothing happens. The package manager works fine.

Hmm, I only installed the menu. The rest I never use. To be honest I removed the menu as well after testing and went back to a modified gnome menu. It is after all a Debian install If I want LMDE I'll install it with all these apps functioning correctly.

I wonder how long it would take to remove all the apps from LMDE that you don't need and clean up with autoremove. I'd wager it would be somewhat faster than fiddling with getting all this running properly. Food for thought.

That said, I imagine it will be another missing python module. Hopefully someone will know which one.

By reading carefully michael.conner's instructions (and vincent's tutorial) i gave it try. I m planning to continue with LMDE Testing so my objective was to dual-boot with something extremely stable, as a secondary option (you know, just in case).
So i ended up installing a plasma-kde-desktop without trying to "mintify" it. Ii took me less an hour and it the installation process was easier than i was expecting. Maybe it is difficult for people that are fond of pictures or for completely newbies: if it was my very first linux installation, i would get lost in no time (sorry for my english).
My big disappointment though was KDE: Debian+KDE seems slower than LMDE+Gnome, and KDE itself is so "decorated' , with sub-sub-menus into sub-menus into menus...
So, when i find some time i ll go for a Xfce (or even gnome) installation, as my stable backup, pointing constantly in squeeze.

PS: Netinstall is great. I wish that it will come in the future as an alternative option for MInt too
PS2: After the installation, splash screen was changed and Debian KDE is the automatic selection. So, i have to manually select LMDE in every startup. Tried to change it with startup manager but no lucK. Any idea?

The Debian Live site has a *great* KDE 4.4.5 live ISO. I'm running it right now off a USB drive -- the only things that aren't nearly perfect out of the box are that Iceweasel is ugly (no GTK appearance control panel installed) and touchpad tapping isn't working immediately. Might be worth checking out if one wanted to use Mint tools with a KDE system with very little work.